Though far from accepting most of Mr. Collins’s long array of Greek parallels, I do hold that by “natural affinity,” by congruity of genius, Shakespeare approached and resembled the great Athenians. One thing seems certain to me. If Shakspere read and borrowed from Greek poetry, he knew it as well (except Homer) as Mr. Collins knew it; and remembered what he knew with Mr. Collins’s extraordinary tenacity of memory. Now if “Shakespeare” did all that, he was not the actor. The author, on Mr. Collins’s showing, must have been a very sedulous and diligent student of Greek poetry, above all of the drama, down to its fragments. The Baconians assuredly ought to try to prove, from Bacon’s works, that he was such a student. Mr. Collins, “a violent Stratfordian,” overproved his case. If his proofs be accepted, Shakspere the actor knew the Greek tragedians as well as did Mr. Swinburne. If the author of the plays were so learned, the actor was not the author, in my opinion—he _was_, in the opinion of Mr. Collins. If Shakespeare’s spirit and those of Sophocles and Æschylus meet, it is because they move on the same heights, and thence survey with “the poet’s sad lucidity” the same “pageant of men’s miseries.” But how dissimilar in expression Shakespeare can be, how luxuriant and apart from the austerity of Greece, we observe in one of Mr. Collins’s parallels. Polynices, in the _Phœnissæ_ of Euripides (504–506), exclaims: “To the stars’ risings, and the sun’s I’d go, And dive ’neath earth,—if I could do this thing,— Possess Heaven’s highest boon of sovereignty.” Then compare Hotspur: “By Heaven, methinks it were an easy leap To pluck bright honour from the pale faced moon, Or dive into the bottom of the deep, Where fathom-line could never touch the ground, And pluck up drownèd honour by the locks, So he that doth redeem her thence, might wear Without corrival all her dignities.” What a hurrying crowd of pictures rush through Hotspur’s mind! Is Shakespeare thinking of the _Phœnissæ_, or is he speaking only on the promptings of his genius? V SHAKESPEARE, GENIUS, AND SOCIETY